NASA just discovered 1,284 new planets — here's how many could potentially support life

An
artist's composite of the Kepler telescope in this undated NASA
handout image.REUTERS/NASA

On Tuesday, NASA announced the Kepler space telescope's discovery
of 1,284 planets outside of our solar system, more than doubling
the number of known Kepler exoplanets. This brings the
tally up to 2,325.

More than 100 of the new planets are 1.2 Earth masses or smaller
and are "almost certainly rocky in nature."

Of all the new planets, 550 are small and possibly rocky, and
nine of them reside in the habitable zone, which could
potentially support life.

"We are sampling the galaxy to understand how many planets
there are and how far out we have to search in order to find
potentially habitable planets like Earth," Natalie Batalha, the
Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in
the announcement.

The Kepler space telescope is a space observatory launched in
2009 with the mission of finding Earth-size planets in areas that
could potentially support life.

The telescope searches for the faint dimming that occurs when a
planet crosses the path of one of those stars. The goal of this
is to identify possible exoplanets that are Earth-size or larger
and are in zones favorable to life.

The new findings more than double the number of
previously known exoplanets.

Take a look:

NASA

Since its launch, Kepler has helped astronomers confirm the
existence of more than 1,000 exoplanets, or planets outside of
our solar system. Astronomers now believe that, on
average, there may be at least
one planet orbiting every star in the sky.

In the 2009 mission, Kepler, which makes a complete journey
around the sun every 371 days, constantly shifted its gaze as it
orbited in order to stayed fixed on a single section of the sky.
This allowed it to monitor roughly
150,000 stars for years at a time.

In 2014, NASA
started K2, a follow-up to the 2009 Kepler mission, to
continue the search for exoplanets while also studying
supernovae, comets, asteroids, and other cosmic phenomena using
Kepler. While the original Kepler mission required the telescope
to remain fixed on one, unchanging portion of the sky, in K2 its
field of view sweeps a band across the entire sky, pointing to a
new portion every 80 days, Time reports.

Of the thousands of candidates NASA found this round, which looks
at data from the original Kepler mission, a whopping 1,284 have
been confirmed. They're shown in the pie chart below in
orange:

NASA

Here's a look at all of the planets in the habitable zone — shown
below in green — which could potentially support life:

NASA

"We're going to change the way you see
the universe," Batalha said. "When you
look up at the sky, you won't just see pinpoints as stars. You'll
see them as planetary
systems. You'll look up at a
point of light and say that star has a living world orbiting
it."